For the very latest updates go to your preferred/local weather source. The orange icons are the nuclear power stations. Brunswick Nuclear Power Station is near the center of Hurricane Florence. Click to enlarge image. The time for this radar exported to Google maps is around the time of the two other radar images found below […]

A SUPER typhoon that has already dwarfed Hurricane Florence is set to break records as it tears towards its target with up to 43 million people in the firing line.Megan Palin@megan_palin, SEPTEMBER 14, 2018

AN “extremely dangerous” super typhoon predicted to be the one of the strongest systems on record is howling towards Hong Kong and the Philippines with up to 43 million people in the firing line.

Typhoon Mangkhut is the equivalent of a Category 5 severe tropical cyclone, boasting maximum sustained winds of 205kph and gusts up to 285kph. Bureau of Meteorology Australia tropical climatologist Greg Browning told news.com.au that Mangkhut was “significantly stronger” than Hurricane Florence which is simultaneously hurtling towards the US as North Carolina locals evacuate the region to avoid the onslaught.

“(Mangkhut is) relatively rare (because it’s) at the top of the severe scale,” Mr Browning said. It’s extremely dangerous as it’s a very large system with very strong winds and a potential storm surge over a large distance.

“There will be very heavy rainfall associated with it which has potential to cause widespread damage.”

Mr Browning said Mangkhut was the most powerful storm system to have developed on Earth this year but that it wasn’t the strongest since records began in 1946, as has been reported internationally. Typhoon Haiyan – which killed more than 6,000 people when it lashed the Philippines with maximum sustained winds of 230kph and gusts of 325kph in 2013 – holds that record.

On Friday, Mangkhut was in the Pacific, about 450km from the Philippines with the 125km-wide eye expected to make landfall on the country’s largest island, Luzon, on Saturday.

The Global Disaster Alert and co-ordination System (GDACS) said it expected a “high humanitarian impact based on the storm strength and the affected population in the past and forecasted path” of destruction. As many as 43 million people could be exposed to Mangkhut’s cyclonic winds, according to the GDACS. More than four million Filippinos are reportedly at risk of the storm which could drench areas as far south as the country’s island capital, Manila. Mr Browning said the super typhoon was then likely to continue tracking west to Hong Kong and southern China, jeopardising millions more lives, on Sunday and Monday.

‘THE BIGGEST KILLER OF ALL’

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Hawaii has categorised the system as a “super typhoon“ which Mr Browning said equates to “very destructive winds” and heavy rainfall that’s likely to cause infrastructure damage anywhere it hits.

“But the biggest killer of all with a system like this is typically the storm surge,” he said.

“The region close to the typhoon’s crossing can expect (to bare the brunt).”

With a 900km wide rain band – which is 50 per cent bigger than Haiyan’s – combined with seasonal monsoon rains, the typhoon could also set off landslides, according to forecasters.

Countries across east and southeast Asia are issuing emergency alerts and ordering evacuations as both Mangkhut and a second storm, Typhoon Barijat taunt the region.

Mangkhut is forecast to hit the northeastern Cagayan province of the Philippines, early on Saturday local time.

Office of Civil Defense chief Ricardo Jalad told an emergency meeting led by the Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte that about 4.2 million people in Cagayan, nearby Isabela province and outlying regions were vulnerable to the most destructive effects near the typhoon’s 125km-wide eye. Nearly 48,000 houses in those high-risk areas are made of light materials and vulnerable to Mangkhut’s ferocious winds.

Storm warnings have been raised in 25 provinces across the Philippines restricting air and sea travel. Schools have been closed and bulldozers are on standby in the event of landslides.

The military and police in Luzon have been placed on red alert — barring all troops from going on leave — so they can respond to emergencies in communities expected to bear the brunt of the typhoon.

Cagayan Governor Manuel Mamba told local media that this typhoon was “very different, this is more complicated because of possible storm surges”.

MEGACITIES IN PATH OF DESTRUCTION

The Hong Kong observatory’s tracking system shows a 70 per cent probability that Mangkhut could deviate within a 500km radius from its predicted position, causing uncertainty over the next few days. The observatory warned of rough seas and frequent heavy squalls, urging residents of the densely populated financial hub to “take suitable precautions and pay close attention to the latest information” on the storm.

Australian expat Alexis Galloway, who lives in Hong Kong, told news.com.au the government this morning “announced on the radio they are opening 47 emergency shelters once the T3 is raised”.

“This is the first time I’m actually quite nervous (about a typhoon) … we live right on the water too and 15 minutes from Shenzhen! Right in the thick (of it),” she said.

The system is already stronger than any of the 15 past severe or super typhoons that warranted the highest “No 10” warning sign, the South China Morning Post reports.

On the Chinese mainland, the three southern provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Hainan are co-ordinating preparations, including suspending transport and moving people to shelter inland, the national meteorological agency reported. The area is home to a string of megacities and more than 100 million people. Guangdong, China’s manufacturing hub, has set up 3777 shelters, while more than 100,000 residents and tourists have been moved to safety or sent home. The province has recalled more than 36,000 fishing boats to port, while train services between the cities of Zhanjiang and Maoming have been suspended and all ferry services between the Guangdong and Hainan have been put on hold.

Bideford radiation expert held over home chemicals, BBC News, 13 September 2018A radiation scientist has spoken of his anger at being arrested on suspicion of making a bomb.Two police officers “felt unwell” during a visit to Dr Chris Busby’s home in Bideford, Devon, which boasts its own laboratory.

The 73-year-old said he was held for 19 hours under the Explosives Act before being released with no further action………..

A cordon was set up around his home on Wednesday morning when the two officers complained of feeling unwell – which Dr Busby attributed to “psychological problems associated with their knowledge of the Skripal poisoning”.

The scientist said he was handcuffed and interviewed all night by police who suspected he was making a bomb, but the only substances found at his home were “innocuous chemicals for research into radiation”.

He returned home that night to find officers had searched his home laboratory and sealed off his home in Bridge Street.

“They destroyed my experiment. It was most irritating,” he said.

Dr Busby said he felt he was being targeted because of his criticism of the government’s current assessment of radiation risks.

Here’s how climate change is fueling HurricaneFlorence A novel forecast looks at the size and fury of the storm with and without human-caused warming, Science News, BY CAROLYN GRAMLING , SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

Even as Hurricane Florence bears down on the Carolinas, bringing fierce winds and heavy rains, one team of scientists has undertaken a different kind of forecast: Understanding the influence of human-caused climate change on a storm that hasn’t made landfall yet.

Real-time storm forecasts continuously update as new data become available. But what would happen if, from a single starting point — in this case, the state of the atmosphere on September 11 — Florence roared ahead in two parallel worlds: one with and one without the influence of human-caused climate change?

In that hypothetical scenario, Florence was bigger than if it would be if it had occurred in a world with no human-caused warming, climate modeler Kevin Reed of Stony Brook University in New York and colleagues conclude in a study posted on the university’s website September 12. And thanks to warmer sea surface temperatures and more available moisture in the air, it would dump 50 percent more rain on the Carolinas, the researchers predict.

Until now, such studies have been conducted only when the event is long over. Reed and his colleagues got a jump on that question, conducting the first attribution study for an extreme event that is still in progress. It’s not yet clear what role such real-time attribution studies might play in society; they could aid emergency planning, policy making and even climate-related litigation.

In the meantime, what this study reveals is that “dangerous climate change is here now,” says study coauthor Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. “The chances and magnitude of dangerous extreme weather have already been significantly increased.”

SPECIAL REPORT: New-build Britain – inside the Hinkley, Moorside and Horizon nuclear projectshttps://www.compelo.com/energy/news/nuclear-britain-hinkley-moorside-horizon/ By Compelo Staff Writer, 14 Sept 18, As the UK vision for nuclear energy comes into question, Janet Wood gives an update on recent developments at the Hinkley, Moorside and Horizon projects.The UK nuclear new-build programme remains the flagship scheme of its type in Europe, with a new fleet planned to replace the elderly plants that currently supply up to a fifth of electricity generation.

But although the government’s broad commitment is secure, little remains of its original vision of a series-build approach that would cut costs and build a domestic industry. In practice, the UK has become something of a test bed for Asian reactor exporters, rather than a new rebirth for European nuclear, with Chinese and Japanese companies leading projects.

The UK nuclear new-build programme has been a casualty of both global nuclear industry failures and a changing domestic power industry, which has seen dramatic falls in the cost of offshore wind and a boom in interconnection. Nuclear still has strong political backing – in fact, it seems that the government will have to take some kind of stake in future projects. That is partly because the projects are seen as so risky by investors, and partly because successive reports by parliamentarians and UK financial watchdogs, like the National Audit Office, have pointed out that the government’s insistence that it had transferred that risk to the private sector had been a major factor in raising costs, because the government could secure cheaper finance for the project than the private sector.

Far from giving the go-ahead for a series, the influential National Infrastructure Commission said this year in its National Infrastructure Assessment that “Government should not agree support for more than one nuclear power station beyond Hinkley Point C before 2025.” Continue reading →

For centuries, researchers have noticed that rates of violence and suicide tend to to increase in the summer. In a study published in Nature Climate Change, Stanford University professors showed that temperature increases by 2050 could increase suicide rates by 1.4 percent in the United States and 2.3 percent in Mexico. These seemingly small percentages in the suicide rate are actually quite significant—about twice as large in size as the influence of economic recessions, for example—and might explain why the rate of suicide in the United States has risen dramatically over the last 15 years. In real numbers, it means an additional 21,000 suicides in the US and Mexico per year.

Interestingly, the effects in Texas are some of the highest in the country. Even after the introduction of air conditioning—which would be expected to be a counterbalance—suicide rates there have not declined over recent decades. If anything, the researchers say, the effect has grown stronger in Texas over time.

And the effect is even stronger in Mexico, lending credence to the idea of a connection between how hot it is outside and how much people want to kill themselves. The researchers got it down to a mathematical formula: Every 1-degree Celsius increase in average monthly temperature means an additional 0.7 percent increase in suicides in the United States (and an additional 2.1 percent in Mexico).

In their paper, the authors stressed that rising temperature and climate change alone should not be viewed as direct motivations for suicide. Instead, they point out that these factors may contribute to the risk of suicide by affecting the likelihood that an individual makes a suicide attempt.

Nuclear theft and sabotage threats remain high, report warns
Social unrest contributes to the US’s lack of improvement in the biennial ranking of how well countries protect against theft of weapons-usable materials. Physics Today, David Kramer, 14 Sept 18,Nations must drastically improve cybersecurity protection to guard against thefts of nuclear materials or acts of nuclear sabotage, according to an exhaustive global analysis released 5 September by the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI). One-third of the 44 countries and Taiwan that possess weapons-usable nuclear materials or have reactors, reprocessing plants, and other nuclear facilities lack even the most basic cyberprotections, the NTI reports in its Nuclear Security Index. And although the US received a high grade for its cyberdefenses, it still needs to improve its overall level of protection.

The pace of cyberattacks on nuclear facilities has accelerated in recent years, according to the report. The authors cite multiple incidents that were publicly reported in 2016, including viruses discovered in computer systems at the Gundremmingen Nuclear Power Plant in Germany and the theft of tritium research from the University of Toyama’s Hydrogen Isotope Research Center in Japan. In addition, a former US Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission employee pleaded guilty to charges stemming from an attempt via spear-phishing emails to fraudulently gain confidential information from dozens of DOE employee accounts.

Taiwan and 12 countries, including the US, received the highest grade from the NTI for their defenses against cyberthreats. But many other countries have not upgraded their cyberdefenses since 2016, the last time the NTI conducted its review. The report notes that nations with the largest number of sites are more likely to have cyber-nuclear regulations in place. The NTI recommends that those nations share their expertise and information on threats and vulnerabilities with less advanced countries. It also calls for countries to impose cybersecurity requirements at their nuclear facilities and to increase the number and quality of cyber-nuclear experts at sites.

Among the 22 nations that possess at least 1 kilogram of separated plutonium or highly enriched uranium, the US and Russia came in 12th and 17th, respectively, for their overall level of protections from thefts. The two nations hold the vast majority of weapons-usable materials. Factors considered in the report card besides cyberdefenses include quantities of materials and the number of sites where they are located, security and control measures, and adherence to international norms and agreements.

The US is down one place on the list from 2016 due to “heightened social unrest, resignations and vacancies from key government departments, and the increasingly deep polarization of political party politics.” Changes in regulatory policies require effective governance and bipartisan support, explains Hilary Steiner, a report coauthor from the consulting firm Economist Intelligence Unit. She cites large-scale demonstrations over the past two years, including the violent 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as examples of social unrest that could adversely affect US nuclear regulatory policy……..

Besides the US and Russia, the declared nuclear weapons states ranked 11th (France), 12th (the UK, tied with the US), and 14th (China). Undeclared weapons states Israel, India, and Pakistan were near the bottom of the list, at 18th, 19th, and 20th, respectively. The states judged to be most vulnerable to nuclear theft were Iran and North Korea.

Why Is China Building a Nuclear-Powered Icebreaker? The melting ice of the Arctic does offer things that China wants: resources and shipping routes. And that means profits are to be had. National Interest

by Michael Peck, 14 Sept 18, China is building a nuclear-powered icebreaker to secure its Arctic frontiers . . .

Wait a minute. China doesn’t have any Arctic territories. Its northern borders are Central Asia and Siberia, not the North Pole. Nonetheless, China has joined other nations, such as Russia, the United States, Norway and Canada, in positioning itself for the perceived riches of the North Pole. The nuclear icebreaker will join the recently launched Snow Dragon 2, China’s first domestically produced icebreaker, and the older Xuelong, built in Ukraine.

But the melting ice of the Arctic does offer things that China wants: resources and shipping routes. So, China has opened bidding on a nuclear-powered icebreaker, which Chinese media claims will is a first step toward building a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

“It will be China’s first nuclear-powered icebreaker support ship, and it will be able to break ice, open waterways in the polar region and provide electricity,” according to the Chinamil.commilitary website .

“The ship’s nuclear power unit is huge and can be applied to a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier once updated, so it can be seen as a preparation for the aircraft carrier,” a Chinese analyst told another Chinese state-owned site.

America’s Oldest Operating Nuclear Power Plant to Retire on MondayOilVoice Press – OilVoice 14-Sep-2018The Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station, located 50 miles east of Philadelphia in Forked River, New Jersey, is scheduled to retire on Monday, September 17. The plant first came online on December 1, 1969, making it the oldest commercially operated nuclear power plant in the United States. Oyster Creek was previously expected to retire on December 31, 2019, but its retirement was accelerated by more than a year to coincide with the plant’s fuel and maintenance cycle…………

Oyster Creek will be the sixth nuclear power plant to retire in the past five years. After Oyster Creek’s retirement, the United States will have 98 operating nuclear reactors at 59 plants. Twelve of these reactors, with a combined capacity of 11.7 gigawatts, are scheduled to retire within the next seven years.

Oyster Creek is one of four nuclear power plants—along with Palisades Power Plant, Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station, and Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station—that have planned retirement dates more than a decade before their operating licenses expire. Economic factors have played a significant role in decisions to continue operating or to retire nuclear power plants, as increased competition from natural gas and renewables has made it increasingly difficult for nuclear generators to compete in electricity markets……..

Business Green 14th Sept 2018 Companies have pledged to power their London-premises with 100 per cent
renewable energy,as Sadiq Khan announces first London Climate Action Week
Eleven leading businesses, including Tesco, Sky, and Siemens, have
partnered with London Mayor Sadiq Khan in support of plans to make the
capital a zero carbon city by 2050. The companies announced yesterday they
will work with the Mayor’s Office to cut levels of pollution and emissions
beyond current government targets, while also committing to power their
London premises with 100 per cent renewable energy by 2020 and supporting
the transition towards zero-emission vehicles.https://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/3062752/zero-carbon-capital-businesses-team-up-with-london-mayor-in-decarbonisation-drive

U.S. needs a safer way to store nuclear waste, As Hurricane Florence bears down on the Carolinas, the country is confronting a reality it normally ignores. Newsday, The Editorial Board, September 13, 2018

As Hurricane Florence bears down on the Carolinas, the United States is confronting a reality it normally ignores. This nation has no permanent, safe disposal site for the 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste it has created in power and weapons plants. This waste is largely stored where it was generated, often in vulnerable above-ground tanks — at 80 sites in 35 states, including New York.

Nine of those sites, from northern Georgia to North Carolina, are in the potential path of Florence. Several were built with the same technology as the Fukushima power plant in Japan, whose reactors and waste storage were tragically compromised by a tsunami in 2011……..

A NUCLEAR PLANT BRACES FOR IMPACT WITH HURRICANE FLORENCE, Wired, MEGAN MOLTENIMEGAN MOLTENI 13 Sept 18 I N MARCH 11, 2011, a one-two, earthquake-tsunami punch knocked out the safety systems at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, triggering an explosion of hydrogen gas and meltdowns in three of its six reactors—the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Fukushima’s facility was built with 1960s technology, designed at a time when engineers underestimated plant vulnerabilities during natural disasters. In the US, 20 plants with similar designs are currently operating.

One of them is slated for a head-on collision with Hurricane Florence. Duke Energy Corp’s dual-reactor, 1,870-megawatt Brunswick plant sits four miles inland from Cape Fear, a pointy headland jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean just south of the city of Wilmington, North Carolina. Brunswick has survived decades of run-ins with hurricanes, but Florence could be its biggest test yet. The plant perches near the banks of the Cape Fear River, which drains 9,000 square miles of the state’s most densely populated regions. Like Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Florence is predicted to stall out for days, pounding the Carolinas with unrelenting amounts of water, leading to life-threatening storm surges and catastrophic flooding. NOAA’s National Hurricane Center is projecting 110 mile-per-hour winds, waves as high as 13 feet, and in some places, up to 40 inches of rain.

Duke Energy Corp’s dual-reactor, 1,870-megawatt Brunswick plant sits four miles inland from Cape Fear, a pointy headland jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean just south of the city of Wilmington, North Carolina. Brunswick has survived decades of run-ins with hurricanes, but Florence could be its biggest test yet. The plant perches near the banks of the Cape Fear River, which drains 9,000 square miles of the state’s most densely populated regions. Like Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Florence is predicted to stall out for days, pounding the Carolinas with unrelenting amounts of water, leading to life-threatening storm surges and catastrophic flooding. NOAA’s National Hurricane Center is projecting 110 mile-per-hour winds, waves as high as 13 feet, and in some places, up to 40 inches of rain.

They’re part of a sweep of changes nuclear plants around the US have adopted post-Fukushima……….

Duke predicted a maximum storm surge of 7 feet at the plant’s safety-related buildings. But the plant was originally designed to cope with only 3.6 feet of expected surge, according to the NRC’s 2017 summary assessment of Duke’s hazard reevaluation report, which has not been made public.

In a letter earlier this year, the NRC reminded Duke that the plant’s current design falls short of the reevaluated flood risks. According to Burnell, Duke has since submitted an assessment of how it will cope—including the use of those steel door reinforcements—which the NRC is still evaluating. “The review is not complete but there’s nothing in there to this point that causes us any concern,” says Burnell………….

Storms can be unpredictable, however. Dave Lochbaum, who directs a nuclear safety watchdog group at the Union of Concerned Scientists, has spent a lifetime studying nuclear failures. Brunswick troubles him because in 2012, Duke found hundreds of missing or damaged flood protections at the plant, such as cracked seals and corroded pipes. According to the group, none of the NRC’s subsequent reports have mentioned repairs. “Hopefully they’ve been fixed,” says Lochbaum. “But we’ve not been able to confirm that with the available documentation.”………

In its 2012 post-Fukushima review, Florida Power & Light told the NRC that flood protections at its St. Lucie plant on South Hutchinson Island were adequate, despite failing to discover six electrical conduits with missing seals in one of the emergency core cooling systems. Two years later, a freak storm inundated Florida’s central coast with record rainfall, flooding one of the plant’s reactors with 50,000 gallons of stormwater. The deluge submerged core cooling pumps, rendering them useless. Had the reactor faltered during the storm, the plant would not have been able to maintain a safe and stable status beyond 24 hours, according to an NRC notice of violation issued to FPL after the incident………https://www.wired.com/story/a-nuclear-plant-braces-for-impact-with-hurricane-florence/

“Hothouse Earth is likely to be uncontrollable and dangerous to many,” said the article by scientists at University of Copenhagen, Australian National University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Rivers would flood, storms would wreak havoc on coastal communities, and coral reefs would be eliminated — all by century‘s end or even earlier.

Global average temperatures would exceed those of any interglacial period — meaning warmer eras that come in between Ice Ages — of the past 1.2 million years.

Melting polar ice caps would lead to dramatically higher sea levels, flooding coastal land that is home to hundreds of millions of people.

“Places on Earth will become uninhabitable if ‘Hothouse Earth‘ becomes the reality,” said co-author Johan Rockstrom, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Where is the tipping point?

Researchers suggest the tipping point could come once the Earth warms to 3.6 Fahrenheit (2 Celsius) over pre-industrial times.

The planet has already warmed 1 C over pre-industrial times, and is heating up at a rate of 0.17 C per decade.

“A 2 C warming could activate important tipping elements, raising the temperature further to activate other tipping elements in a domino-like cascade that could take the Earth System to even higher temperatures,” said the report.

This cascade “may tip the entire Earth system into a new mode of operation,” said co-author Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Experts also worry about phenomena like , which will spread as the planet gets hotter and drier and have the potential to accelerate carbon dioxide buildup and global warming.

How they calculated this

The “Perspective” article is based on previously published studies on tipping points for the Earth.

The scientists also examined conditions the Earth has seen in the distant past, such as the Pliocene period five million years ago, when CO2 was at 400 ppm like today.

During the Cretaceous period, the era of the dinosaurs some 100 million years ago, CO2 levels were even higher at 1,000 ppm, largely due to volcanic activity.

To state that 2 C is a no-return threshold “is new,” said Martin Siegert, co-director of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study.

The study authors “collated previously published ideas and theories to present a narrative on how the threshold change would work,” he said.

“It‘s rather selective, but not outlandish.”

How to stop it

People must immediately change their lifestyle to be better stewards of the Earth, the researchers said.

Fossil fuels must be replaced with low or zero emissions energy sources, and there should be more strategies for absorbing carbon emissions such as ending deforestation and planting trees to absorb carbon dioxide.

Soil management, better farming practices, land and coastal conservation and carbon capture technologies are also on the list of actions.

Yet even if humans stopped emitting greenhouse gases, the current warming trend could trigger other Earth system processes, called feedbacks, driving even more warming.

Hurricane Florence could cause an environmental and public health disaster, as heavy rains may overwhelm pits holding toxic waste from power plants, industrial sites or animal-manure lagoons. This toxic waste could wash into homes and threaten drinking water supplies. …….

Ken Raskin 14 Sept 18, There is no way to store nuclear waste safely. Uranium mine waste, can be diluted and reburied if it is done properly. Medical isotopes, any purified radionuclide, reactor waste, enriched uranium processing byproducts, residue from factories to make plutonium more- concentrated radionuclide waste and a large variety of the most dangerous man-manmade radionuclides. Like Hanford, WIPP, San Onofre, any casks or Used fuel rods full of Plutonium , cesium137/134, cobalt 60, strontium 90 , uranium 235 . Fuel rods Fuel storage pools around nuclear reactors, that are very vulnerable to catching fire because of their zirconium cladding.

There are more synthetic gamma and beta emitters and strong alpha emitter-radionuclides in the environment, than they want you to know about! They generate heat, from their radioactive-nature. Many are highly chemically-reactive too. They emit beta, gamma and neutrons that will change/degrade the walls of the material, they are encased in. They can generate gases. They can catalyze exothermic reactions, with substance in around, where they are stored. They can generate combustible-explosive gases like hydrogen. The nuclearists, have gone out of their way, to keep these things a secret for years. Dr Busby has gone out of his way to explain how many so radionuclides cannot be stored safely. Especially in the case of the Swedes wanting to use copper casks for nuclear waste

Some misinformants will say that radioactive elements do not do, decay heat. Some do more than others, otherwise they could not be used in radiosotope thermal generators. Heat decay was noted, to cause Hanford radioactive cesium tanks to leak.

The kitty litter in wipp did not spontaneously catch fire. The plutonium helped. Oxidized plutonium is also known to be pyrogenic.There is no safe way to store radionuclides. There was a large swath of of nuclear waste, that exploded in nevada. Two large casks exploded in idaho recently. More people, awakened to the dangerous nature of radionuclides and, how hard it is to store them. .

The Nuclear Industry and Govt, Do Not Want This Known.

I have been to Japan. I have been to Ukraine. Many peoples eyes are wide-opened, about the radionuclide apocolypse, that we are in the midst of.

WE ARE LIVING ON THE BEACH, IN THE USA. IN JAPAN IT IS MUCH WORSE! I have LIVED IN one of the worst radionuclide cancer and poison clusters, in the world. 3 generations of families wiped-out in small communities in the United States! Not just Mayak.

Burning coal and hyrocarbons pollutes the air, water, and food with megatons of radium, polonium, thorium and protractinium annually. It is one of the prime reasons, 200 million or more americans drink radioactive water.

These natural radionuclides also come from oil and chemical refineries concentrating them and dumping them into the air and rivers. Fracking does a great deal of dirty work this way too.
Humans are living in a world of self-created radiionuclide filth and sewer!

I am a trained medical toxicologist. I saw extreme radionuclide-exposures in the forms of radiopharmaceutical overdoses and severe radionuclide-industrial accidents. Accidents with exposures to things like radioactive cesium, used in radiography equipment.
Even the experts and antinuclear advocates, are reluctant to go into, how bad things really are. I have no corporate, right-wing extremist bias or government entanglements. I have been watching Fukushima since the beginning!

I wish nuclear-shills would take a basic engineering class, or a biochemistry or cellular biology class or even a modern basic biology class and be forced to rationally explain the disparities in their presentations between their rhetoric and reality. Of course they will not because, they are paid propagandists and liars.

There will be nothing left, unless the nuclear madness is stopped. Nothing left of life on earth because, in very small amounts radionuclides, destroy the capability of the biochemical reactions that give us life, to be possible. There will be no life Unless the continuance of the radionuclide tsunami is ended and radionuclides are sequestered, our end will be much sooner than later. There is no way back to the good ol days..